You Found Me
by Laura Schiller
Summary: Mr. March struggles to write the sermon for Beth's funeral, but help arrives from an unexpected place.


You Found Me

By Laura Schiller

Based on: _Little Women_

Copyright: Public domain

/

"_Lost and insecure_

_You found me, you found me_

_Lying on the floor_

_Surround me, surround me_

_Why'd you have to wait?_

_Where were you, where were you?_

_Just a little late_

_You found me, you found me"_

"You Found Me", by The Fray

/

It was eleven o'clock on a Saturday night, and the Reverend Robert March could not finish his sermon for tomorrow.

He'd been huddled at his desk for hours, writing and crossing things out, watching the candle burn down and the ink dry on his pen, leafing the yellowed, dog-eared pages of his Bible until the words refused to make sense to him. A late-winter New England snowstorm beat against the windowpanes. The fire, burning low to save coal, cast flickering shadows over the bookshelves and a strange light on the Crucifixion scene on the wall. Christ's painted eyes seemed to follow Robert wherever he looked, and not in a comforting way.

As an army chaplain, Robert should have known by now how to write eulogies for young people who had died before their time. Some in a burst of violence, some from a lingering infection; some quietly, some screaming and sobbing; some had even died by their own hand, the only way they could think of to escape the horrors of war.

Yes, he had written many eulogies … but never for his own daughter.

John 11:25. _"I am the resurrection and the life …" _But that meant nothing to him when he had seen Beth gasping out her life in her mother's arms, and when he knew that tomorrow he would see her coffin lowered into the ground. It meant nothing if he would never hear her play "Land of the Leal" again, never watch her play with her kittens or analyze _Pilgrim's Progress_ for the millionth time, never see her blue eyes crinkle into that tranquil smile of hers. Even if they met again in heaven, it would never be the same.

_You never had children, _thought Robert, his eyes traveling from Christ with his crown of thorns to blue-cloaked Mary at the foot of the cross. _But You had a mother. You must have some idea of human love. You saved Lazarus because he had sisters who depended on him, so why not save our Beth? I have tried to serve You all my life, so why take from me what I love most?_

He was deeply ashamed as he thought this. A minister should not have favorites among his parishioners, and still less a father among his children. But while he loved all his daughters, Beth had been the only one he understood. Her quiet, orderly, introverted ways had made sense to him in a way the others' vivacity had not. Even her weaknesses were ones he shared. Having joined the church mainly for intellectual reasons, and still suffering from stage fright in the pulpit, he would never have looked down on his little girl for being afraid of Mr. Laurence.

Was that why God had taken her? Because they all loved her too much?

If so, God was cruel.

Frightened by the blasphemous thoughts running through his head, he threw down his pen and buried his face in his hands. _Forgive me, _he pleaded, but he did not even know to whom he was speaking – God, Beth, the rest of his family, or himself.

His answer, however, did not come in the form of a vision or a voice from above. It came as a knock on the door, a rattle of china, a clumsy foot pushing the door open, and Jo's red-rimmed eyes squinting at him above the tray she carried.

"Father? Would you like some tea? I, um, saw your light through the door and I thought … "

Jo had always been the chaos to Beth's order. The same passion and energy Robert loved so much in his wife was intensified in Jo, and the result was sometimes overwhelming. But bringing him tea in the middle of the night was so much like something Beth would have done – she'd always had a sixth sense for when he was troubled – that he could not turn her away.

"Thank you, my dear."

He took the tray, set it down on his desk, and gave Jo a kiss on the forehead. She looked startled. Had it really been so long since he'd shown affection to his family?

"May I … " She shuffled sideways toward the fireplace and the bookshelf next to it. "May I stay here for a while? Only … it's so quiet in my room."

Of course. The four girls had shared a room for most of their lives, but now Jo was the only one left who lived there. Meg had her own home, Amy was in Europe, and Beth would never need her sheets changed or her pillow fluffed again.

"Certainly." Robert unwrapped one of the blankets from around his shoulders , tucked it around Jo (she'd lost weight and her first gray hair was showing – when had that happened?) and let her have the cushioned chair by the fire where his parishioners sometimes came when they wanted to speak to him in private. "Is there anything else you need? … A book perhaps?"

As a small child, Jo had been such a hazard to his precious books – sticky fingers, scribbles in the margins, precocious questions that gave him a headache – that he had tried to keep her out of his study altogether. Her mother had put her foot down. _"Which is more important,"_ she'd asked, storm-gray eyes flashing, _"A bit of ink and paper, or our daughter's mind? If she's old enough to search for answers, she's old enough to hear them." _As so often, she'd been right.

But it was not the books Jo was using to search for her answers tonight.

"Talk to me, Father." Her voice trembled. "Talk to me as you did to Beth, for I'm all wrong."

And that, of all times, was when Robert finally found the starting point for his eulogy.

As a young man, he'd been able to sense God everywhere: to see Him in the pattern of a snowflake, hear Him in the resonance of the organ music in church, feel His warmth in the embrace of his family. But as he grew older, plunged his family into poverty with one foolish investment, joined the war and witnessed all its atrocities, and came back home to find that Beth had fallen ill, God's presence had begun to seem further away every year.

Since Dr. Bangs had told them that Beth would not live past her twentieth birthday, Robert's world had drained of meaning altogether.

Until tonight, when he had caught a glimpse – the faintest broken glimpse, but it was enough – of God watching him through Jo's tear-worn eyes.

John 11:35. _"Jesus wept." _That was the shortest verse in the Bible. The story of Lazarus was not only about the Son of God working a miracle against the laws of nature. It was about two women who had lost their brother and a man who had lost his friend, and how in spite of grief, anger, geographical distance and every other barrier, mutual love had brought them together.

"My dear," said Robert to his daughter, "Nothing can comfort me like this … but I must confess that I have no answers either, only questions, as you can see."

He gestured to the blotted, crossed-out sheets of paper scattered over his desk. Jo picked one up and held it close to the candle, frowning as she squinted at his untidy handwriting. Before yesterday, he would have told her in no uncertain terms to leave that alone – he was a perfectionist and would never dream of showing anyone an unfinished piece of writing – but tonight, none of his habits mattered.

"Is that Latin?"

He adjusted his spectacles. "Yes. A quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas. I thought … I don't know what I was thinking."

"Please don't do that!" Jo burst out, with a vehemence that made the candle flutter. "No Latin, no Greek, no philosophers … please don't make this sound like it was thousands of years ago. Just talk about Beth – that's all. Talk about that time she ran away from Mr. Laurence and then made him a pair of embroidered slippers to apologize … or the time she made friends with Frank Vaughn even after she asked me to protect her from 'the dreadful boys". Talk about the Hummels and how she kept visiting them when the rest of us forgot … " She bent her head over the desk, blotting the papers even more with her tears.

For the first time in many months, the scholar's mind, the minister's soul and the father's heart in Robert were in accord. Jo was right about the eulogy, and he needed her as much as she needed him.

He held his grown daughter close, rubbed her back in circles, and rocked her from side to side as he had not done since she was very small.

"Tell me everything," he said, settling her back in her chair and returning to his desk to pull out a fresh sheet of paper. "Everything you remember. With your help, we'll have this finished by daybreak at the latest."

They spoke in soft voices for the rest of the night, huddled together at the desk by the flickering light of the fire and candles, writing together for the first time in their lives.


End file.
